Cardboard Chronicles

 A great example is that of the Mayor NPC, who also went through a lot of revisions on where they need to be, what dialogues they would say, and what their dialogues would trigger. 

In an initial passthrough the flow was that the Player would have to talk to Mayor, which would then spawn in creatures after that dialogue sequence. Once that combat encounter was done, the Mayor would teleport to the middle of the starting area and talk to the player, which would open up another interaction that would get rid of a blocked path up ahead. 

This lead to the code having to be checked in this manner then. 

This path changed again and instead became: 

Now this was fine on the town center when everything was in one place, but due to the open world-esque structure of the world we ended up needing to save those states and run checks when players would load in and out of maps. This would force me to rethink my logic I had implemented before, but on top of that the thing that made this harder than it needed to be was the placement of one of the bell pieces in the Town Center itself. So, I needed some way of hearing those events as they were triggered even if the player was in the town level. 

I then adopted a back to forth approach to the logic while coding them. I needed to check their last task which was if the town bell was rung or not. If it was run then I can just teleport him and change his dialogue to the last branch it needs to be. 

If it's not I'd create a listener for the event, on bell rung, in case the player found the bell pieces and still hasn't rung the bell. 

I then needed to check if the Player had collected the three bell pieces, 

The first block you see refers to checking if the Town Bell has been rung or not. That was considered a "Puzzle" by our Engineers, so I was able to use the Puzzle Enum and run a simple true or false. 

If true, code was straight forward, just teleport the Mayor near the Tower and then give them the final branch of dialogue. 

However, if it was false that's where things got tricky. Due to the event being able to be triggered in the scene itself and I was only running this check on EventBeginPlay, I needed to create a Listener and launch that sequence of events which is where I bind the event to Object Trigger. I then need to check if a previous condition in chronological order has been reached or not, so I call another event (CollectBell) after creating the Listener Event. 

This block of code (CollectBell) more or less does the same as this where it checks if all the pieces are collected or not. 

This is a little bit more spicy code and more to talk about. Over here you can see I started using the Game Param System which was our way of saving things from level to level so things wouldn't automatically set back when moving back and forth between levels without calling everything a Puzzle and placing it there. I could create several events and reference them, but it required such an attention to detail as any misspellings or difference in letters would cause a crash on PC and on the Switch. 

So again, this is where the backwards approach helped me, if the player had destroyed the rubble in the town center, I just needed the Mayor to stand somewhere else as my other previous code blocks would handle moving the Mayor to the Bell Tower when needed. This area was very dialogue dependent, so what I needed to do was do dialogue checks then. We want the Mayor to change his dialogue to a more generic dialogue after the first introduction so the player had a reminder of what they needed to do without going through the entirety of the Introduction dialogue. 

Code snippet of the entirety of the Mayor Character.